


Heat and Herbs

by shellcollector



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Reference to vomiting, Terrible Nineteenth-Century Medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 07:09:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15990206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellcollector/pseuds/shellcollector
Summary: Joly self medicates with steam, and discusses the merits and demerits of cheering-up.Written for two tumblr prompts requesting cuddles in a blanket fort.





	1. Chapter 1

Lesgle has learned, over time, to anticipate that sometimes when he gets home (and it still gives him a little internal stutter to think of it as ‘home’, but —) something will have Happened in his absence. The furniture rearranged according to rules of magnetism or the energy lines of Chinese philosophers; the air full of camphor or hyssop; or simply the everyday sight of dead limbs partially dissassembled upon the table.

It reminds him of the days when he had homes he did not stutter to think about, until he came home to find a blackened shell, or a caved-in ceiling, or an entire family to whom his landlord had apparently transferred the flat while he was away for a weekend, for reasons that he never managed to establish. But the reminder only ever cheers him with its contrasts; he’d take a thousand skinned human feet and a lungful of peculiar odours over the hollow shock of finding himself alone and untethered, each time somehow jarring in a new way, despite his refusal to take them seriously.

This is perhaps why, when he opens the door to find a room full of steam and all the furniture arranged in its centre and draped with blankets, he’s neither much surprised nor particularly agitated. He only wonders what has happened to Joly, who is nowhere to be seen, despite the large pot of water (and where does the pan come from? Has he seen it in the landlady’s kitchen?) bubbling vigorously upon the stove.

Some unknown instinct drives him in the direction of the central structure. He tries to work out where its entrance might be, but its architecture is too decentralised and incoherent. So he crouches down and is about to lift one of the blankets and squeeze in between two chairs when he’s suddenly struck - quite absurdly - by how private this space feels. Not being one to let absurdity stop him, he knocks three times on the leg of a table.

“Oh!” says a bright voice from inside, slightly muffled by blankets. “You’re back!”

“Can I come in? Or is there a password? If one was set, I’ve forgotten it.”

“Yes, well - I mean if you want to. It’s rather humid in here.”

“More than it is outside?”

“I hope so. At least, that was the idea. Aren’t you coming in? Try not to open the blankets too far, I don’t want the steam to escape.”

He crawls between the chairs, trying to look over his shoulder and make sure that the blankets haven’t been disturbed. It is indeed rather warm and misty inside Joly’s tent, and everything is reddish in the light passing through the scarlet wool. Joly is sitting cross-legged on a cushion under the dining table, another pot of water by his side.

“Please don’t knock this over,” he says. “It’s scalding hot, and even if it weren’t, all of our blankets are here and I don’t know how we’d sleep at night without any dry bedding. I had to borrow extra, even.”

“And the two pots.”

“I’ve a system, you see. Once the heat has dissipated from one, I return it to the stove and bring the other back inside.”

Lesgle nods and carefully shuffles himself over to Joly, trying to stay on the opposite side from the cauldron. He reaches an arm cautiously around Joly’s waist - sometimes when he’s tense this isn’t welcome, but Joly relaxes and leans against his shoulder.

“You can tell me why, if you like,” he says gently.

“ _Well_ ,” Joly says, and so begins a discourse on the _Thomsonian_ system of medicine, named after one M. Samuel Thompson, an American with strong views on heat and herbs.

“— although I can’t replicate his methods entirely,” continues Joly, “since I have been completely unable to get hold of any samples of _lobelia inflata_. I don’t think it grows at all on this side of the Atlantic. Did you know the Americans call it _pukeweed_  —” (his mouth contorts itself over the strange English word) “which is something like ‘the herb of throwing-up’? I did ask a few people if it could be shipped, but without a great deal of success.”

“What a shame,” says Lesgle. “Well, I suppose we’ll have to make do.”

“Oh, you can laugh all you like, but I’m breathing much better in here than I have for days.”

“That’s good. Do you think the effect will remain when you’ve left your — er — fortfication, or will you have to stay in here forever?”

“I’m not quite sure. Do you think this pot needs replacing?”

“There seems to be quite a lot of steam coming off it, still.”

Joly nods and leans into Lesgle further.

Lesgle can feel the steam settling on his face. Joly’s still not told him the other ‘why’ — there’s usually a story behind any particularly dramatic Happenings, a difficult exam or some trouble with his family or with their friends or just the weight of everything that can’t be fixed, but it almost always comes out before long. Joly’s stories never seem to begin and end  where you’d expect; they move in spirals. They circle round and round but always reach the heart of things, thinks Lesgle, and it’s always the same warm place, lit up in crimson and full of cushions and desk legs, damp with a cloudy, herb-scented breath.


	2. Chapter 2

The pot of water is cooling and the air is already beginning to thin. Joly wishes now that he’d got Bossuet to switch them for him before sending him out for dinner, but Bossuet is bad at avoiding being put upon, which means that sometimes Joly has to be extra careful not to put upon him.

He’s just about to get up and switch the pots himself before the heat inside his den drops to a truly suboptimal level, but then he hears someone come in through the front door. For a second he thinks it’s Bossuet, but it’s too soon and the step’s not his. Bossuet is a dear, but he doesn’t believe in locking a door while people are inside — something about fires — and Joly allows himself to feel a little cross about this for a few seconds before deciding what to do about it.

The burglar, if that’s what he is, has a gentle tread. Joly hears the steps approach his hideout, but the heat must be doing something because he doesn’t feel anxious at all. Perhaps he’s not anxious enough? A knock interrupts this chain of thought.

“Are you in?” asks Jean Prouvaire’s voice, soft and sweet. “Bossuet said you were entertaining guests in your castle.”

“Well, humph,” says Joly. “Yes, come in. I ought to change the water, really.”

“Do you want me to bring the other pot in?” asks Prouvaire.

A warm burst of gratitude dilates the vessels around Joly’s heart, pouring blood into its chambers.

“Yes, that would be lovely. I suppose I can wait a little before putting the other on to boil again.”

“It smells wondrous in here.”

“Hmmm, yes.”

There are a few more steps, a low clattering, and then Prouvaire’s somehow pushing the pot in front of him while insinuating his whole body under a chair, snakelike, on his stomach and elbows. He’s taller than Joly or Bossuet, but there’s always a slight, unsettling loosness about his limbs which surely helps him here. Joly pulls the water towards him carefully; it scrapes against the wood of the floor. It’s pleasantly warm, and the air begins to dampen again.

Once inside, Prouvaire lies back over a bolster, his head hanging off the end of it and tilted slightly upside-down, and sighs.

“We could be in the opium dens of Morocco,” he sighs. “Do you have any opium, by the way?”

“No,” says Joly. He hopes that in the reddish light his blush will not be visible. Then the lie starts to eat away at him anyway.

“Or, well,” he amends. “I do, but it’s only for medicinal use — I wouldn’t want to be caught without any, if I had a use of it — I’m sorry, I hope you don’t think that’s selfish of me, or — unless you are in pain? I hope you’re not.”

But Prouvaire’s laughing, which suggests at least that his earlier mood has lifted.

“I think I’d be the selfish one, if I insisted on taking medicine away from your patients. Even if your main patient seems to be yourself, these days. It would only have been for my enjoyment; I’m quite well.”

“That’s good,” says Joly, but he can’t help searching Prouvaire’s upside-down face.

“Really,” says Prouvaire. “I am, you know.”

Joly nods.

“And I wasn’t upset with you earlier, either.”

“I’m sorry,” says Joly. “I wanted to help - only sometimes I’m not very good at it.”

“No.” Prouvaire shakes his head and his hair spills across the floor. “You’re very good at it. Too good, if anything. You could have cheered me up perfectly, but you see, I didn’t want to be cheered up.”

“But that doesn’t make any —”

“Listen,” Prouvaire hauls himself up and pulls up close to Joly. He puts an arm around him. “I know you don’t like seeing me unhappy, but don’t you see that I have to be sometimes? I can’t write about feeling, about _all_ the feelings men can experience, if I don’t let _myself_ experience any of them.”

Joly nods. He’s trying to get his head around what Prouvaire’s saying, but it’s making his temples start to ache.

“I can’t write great tragedies and make men and women weep if every time I feel a bit down in the dumps you and Bossuet come and jolly me up again. Now can I? Look at it this way: you’re studying medicine. How would it be if every time you had to cut up a corpse, or watch a boil being lanced, or one of the other horrid things your books are full of, I came up and said ‘Joly, my friend, you shouldn’t trouble yourself with such nastiness. Come along with me and let’s laugh and drink together.’ That wouldn’t work, would it? Do you follow me?”

“M-maybe?”

“You need to be a witness to all the horrors of the body, if you’re to understand it. Well, I’m a sort of scientist of the human soul; and if that means I have to feel a little melancholy sometimes, or other things — boiling rage, or grief, or jealousy, or the cold terror of waking in the middle of the night and knowing that I’m no more than a speck of dust — well, then that’s what it means. I wouldn’t choose another path, and nor would you.”

Joly doesn’t know what to say. His arm is around Prouvaire, and he tightens it.

“But it’s good, too, knowing that I have friends who won’t let me get lost completely. That’s a sort of safety rope, you see, like the ones that men use when they crawl into caves. And I promise you, if I can’t find my way back, I’ll pull the rope. And I know that you, all of you, will find me.”

Prouvaire’s body feels suddenly small and breakable, and Joly holds him tighter.

“Of course,” he promises. “Always.”


End file.
